DPRC_New-Recording-part2

The speaker's main focus for the year is curriculum alignment and policies. They discuss the process of changing program titles and the need to inactivate old programs while simultaneously starting new ones. They also mention the need for better communication with students regarding program changes. Compliance with regulations regarding program eligibility for veterans and financial aid is also a concern. The speaker suggests using a mail merge system to reach out to students and inform them of program changes. The dean's office of the program being inactivated is responsible for notifying students. The speaker also mentions ongoing work with ITS to create a new table for tracking active and inactive students. My priority for the year, if I were going to put a theme on it, would be curriculum, which I'm not 100% excited about because it's a pain in my rear, but it's everything with trying to get some of these policies, curricular policies, into alignment. It's things looking at our program of study, builds, the consistency. You all know the project Tracy and I have been talking about for a while on having the accurate program of study, the inactivation process. So I'm starting off the fall semester with roadshows for I-Deans. That's all about when we change a program, even if it's just a title change, what that means that we actually have to do. Because from a faculty perspective, they'll say, oh, we just want to change the title of this. And from a curriculum specialist, they can just make a title change and not have to do anything else. But in Banner, they actually have to inactivate that program and then build a new program. And when you inactivate a program, that means there's a teach-out for that program. Because you have all those students who assumed they were going to get a degree and on that degree was going to be printed one title. You can't just switch it in the middle, right? So you have to teach it out under that program title, under those courses within that program. And then you can also simultaneously, right, run your new program with your new title. And then there's a bunch of student communication that we have not been in the habit of doing. So part of my roadshow. But we're finding lots of, as anticipated, sort of the inconsistency when I was working on a project with the selected admissions and working with some of the program staff. And they're looking at the list of programs and they're like, oh, why is that one there? We inactivated that a long time ago. Well, it's still on CCC Apply and it's still in the SSL and still showing up in WebSmart. And related to that, because I told you it's going to be a year of this, hopefully not longer, we're going to, I think I've convinced them for compliance reasons, move back to the baseline degree petition process, which essentially is students can only apply for a degree or certificate, and Alex, this goes to your point, in which they have a Sagastan record for, right, that they have been pursuing. And right now, kind of like you were alluding to, students can go in and choose any degree or certificate. So not good from a compliance perspective, as we've been giving you financial aid for automotive, and then you go in and you apply for nursing to graduate from nursing, right? Because we report all that data to the National Student Clearinghouse and that makes it over to the Department of Ed. So that's not good. So they should only be able to apply for the programs in which they have actually declared. So part of what we're going to have to do in order to get that going, the registrars have said in some cases they have students applying for up to eight programs of study for graduation. I think that's the most. So in order to allow that process, and that means students need to declare eight programs of study, so that then they can apply for graduation for eight programs of study. So there's some configuration with that, but it's a pretty easy configuration. We just, we're working on updating our documentation from a compliance perspective on what that means if you're a veteran or financial aid or international. So there's that. And then the other one that, I blame Tracy for this one, it's all related, is she's working on the 8515 report for veterans. And are you all familiar with the 8515 report? So you can't have too many veterans in a program of study basically that are receiving aid. And because of the way that we have built out our programs of study with multiple program codes for the same program, but then a change of GE patterns, in some cases you may have only two students in a program of study. And if two students, if one student has veterans benefits and the other one doesn't, then that's starting to skew your quote percentage for that program. But the VA, the reason that they have this rule in place is they're concerned mainly at for profit institutions that they're taking advantage of veterans, just recruiting veterans, and then charging a lot of money back to the VA. There you go. 8515 FAQ. Yeah. And so one of the projects, because Tracy, we had some that were in that boat, right? And it really comes down to total numbers of students declared. If you have one of these programs that has only two students to begin with, then it's easy to see those percentages fluctuate from semester to semester. The bigger ones are less concerning. So something like a psychology, which has lots of students to begin with, those aren't as highly impact, but some of the smaller ones like, oh, Tracy, remember off the top of your head, like geology degrees, philosophy, math, you know, things like that. So one of the things that I talked to the registrars about is doing updates to the program codes. Because now, since we're using the concentrations for the GE patterns that they can go in and I won't call it consolidate because it's similar to the process I was just talking about. They need to inactivate the old program codes, create a new one, and then start the process of getting the students, you know, communicating with them over into the new program code with a concentration, a GE concentration. So, but from a compliance perspective, they're going to have to do that because they're going to get caught with some of these programs not being able to be VA eligible, just because the numbers are so small, so. Again, my theme, curriculum for the year. In terms of that outreach, I think we can provide reports that have, you know, the impacted programs of study with the, you know, basically set up a file for a mail merger so that whoever's contacting the students could just say, here is your current program of study. We would like you to switch to this one online by the end of the semester, or, you know, whatever it may be, if that'd be helpful. I'm sure it will not be 100% uptake, but more than zero, probably. Yep. Yeah, and we've done this before. I feel like every summer we've done active students and inactive programs for cleanup, where we just pasted everyone into the smart sheet, and then we sent them kind of an actionable email, and then they responded. And then we have that for audit purposes that the student authorized us to move us into a program. Or the other option they had is, no, don't move me. I want to meet with a counselor. And then they, the person in counseling kind of helped set up that appointment for them. So, I mean, all of those are options. And that's easy for that kind of cleanup project. The other one that I'm going to be doing the roadshow for is when you inactivate a program, you need to inform the students, right? Like, y'all need to reach out. You need to have a program map of when these courses are offered. You need to let them know this is the last time that they can graduate with this program, et cetera, et cetera. So, and I have the template, and I shared the template, but that's not being used and done. So, Tracy's also been working with ITS, and Tracy, I don't know if I'm going into your part of the meeting, to get that sort of set up so that we have those lists to align kind of who the, quote, active students are, right? Because I was asking you all this when we were doing our selective admissions work, who the active students are in the program, who do we need to communicate with as part of this, et cetera, et cetera. So, are you putting this stuff in the chat for me? I have not been reading it. Oh, that's okay. I was just curious, when you say you have to let them know, was there a specific department that needs to be charged with letting students know about programs being done with? Yeah, and I have a process map on it, and it's the, it's basically the dean's office of the program that's being inactivated. Oh, okay. Yeah, so it's really managed a lot by the division assistant for that. So, in terms of the active, inactive students we're waiting for, we're going to, we ended up, probably we'll create a new table of just called inactive, active students, because inactive, active students is not necessarily related to registration, right? It's related to our first one, we've enrolled, so we can't really fit it into current courses. I don't think we want to. So, my, I think, so I'm waiting for ITS to create a new table with just those slides. So, I'll put it on, it's not, I didn't put it on the DPFC, I'll put it on the where list, when it's created. It's not there, there's nothing there, but they're on the to-do list, I guess. But part of what the struggle has been is when we consider a student active, and like Tracy said, it's not based off of enrollment, right? It's the, when they have to be readmitted, once they stop not taking classes, and so it's always been tied to this readmit term in Banner, which is very confusing a lot of times to be able to figure that out. So, even after students have graduated, they're still considered active until one year where they're not taking those courses. And then to compound that, in the spring, you all might recall, we did a project of students, what was it, inactive students in active systems. So, they still had access to all of our systems, even though they haven't been with us for a long period of time, and so we created a process where we communicated with them, I want to say eight times over two or three months, that you need to move all your personal photos out of Google Drive, as an example, and your email is going until you reapply. And so, we created a new status within Banner to kind of say whether this is an active or inactive student, and my hope is that we're going to align something with that, right, Tracy? And that's the indicator that will come over to say whether they're active or inactive. But what was problematic with that is in the spring, when we brought this to ESC, they said, well, they should be inactivated from the systems, the technological systems, after two years, which does not align with our readmit policy, which is one year, right? I know, I know. And part of their concern was, is that the students, even when they're not here anymore, they still need access to things like an unofficial transcript, or a 1098-T, or enrollment verification, or something like that. And so, what IT created is the ability for students to go in and temporarily reactivate for 48 hours, so they can go in, get their unofficial transcript, get their 1098-T, and then it becomes inactivated again, but it doesn't, they can't register, right? Like, if they want to register for classes, and they're inactive, they need to go and reapply to get in. So, we did get approval from ESC to make that change, because it was causing a lot of errors that they were having to fix, and they were like, oh, okay. So, they're good with temporary reactivation. We got it approved by VPs last week, I think it was, VP Council, so that's moved forward to IT to put in place for the next round of inactivations. But, so my hope is that when that happens, that then, and I don't know, Tracy, if this is what you and Sunita and Edgar were talking about, but looking at that inactive indicator, inactive student, yeah. Right, but then it wouldn't matter, like, we wouldn't need to know, because IT would just change the definition of what is active and what is inactive, and we would have that table. Yeah, exactly. Nothing is ever easy. Thanks, all, for doing this. We are actually out of time. We have much to go through first before technical. So, are there any further questions? Yes, yes, we added it. We put a late addition to the agenda. We have no time. But, I wanted to ask about, what is it, AB, what is it, Zahra, and the student parenting, the new law to give student parents early registration, or priority registration status, and you all have probably received emails from the Urban Institute. There is a grant opportunity, which I hadn't paid much attention to which I hadn't paid much attention to because I felt like this is something that should be at the TTCO level, you know, or even district level, but no one would like us to apply. So, if we apply for this grant opportunity, it seems to me very much a district level kind of thing, but it is $30,000 a year for two years to develop data collection methods, way of collecting data on student parents so that we can identify them and then offer them services. So, here are some of the things that we are going to be required to do, and of course, my hesitation is, of course, no money is free money. There is an expectation of what we have to do. I don't know, even though this is important and everything, it seems like, I don't know if we wanted to devote this much focus and attention and time. You have to send a team to meetings in Oregon and Washington, D.C., and then this is the data thing. So, I just wanted to get your take, and especially Carrie, is this anything that the district is looking at? I mean, we already put into place last spring the priority registration for student parents. How do you identify the student parents? From the financial aid screens, because on the three, FAFSA, CCPG, and California Dream Act, there is a question on there about whether the student has depended children. Right. And what if the student didn't apply for financial aid? The deans of enrollment services talked about that, that if there was a way that we could identify them, they didn't come up with a viable solution on that. Yeah. So, I think this is what they're trying to do, because they acknowledge that FAFSA is one method, and they want colleges to go beyond that. But I guess my question is, is this a college-level type of initiative and data collection, or would this be done at the district-wide level? And wouldn't we think that the CCC, the chancellor's office, is doing something given this new law? There was conversations with CCC Apply, and I think they added some new questions to CCC Apply, but what we talked about in ESC is that we're not going to tie priority registration to that, because CCC Apply is a point in time, and you could have applied, let's say, decades ago and stay continuously enrolled. So, the financial aid route was more up-to-date, if you will, with that. All three of the colleges verify the other parts of the, what was it, AB 2881 were implemented, which I think were a website, and then in the new student orientations, putting reference to the website. And then I think this is also one that has to be reviewed on an annual basis, so they set up reminders to make sure that that review is taking place in order to comply with that. I would say, though, Ingrid, that if you want to get some traction on it, then I would talk to Will, because I know that the Dean's Enrollment Services had a conversation about how they could put this together, so they might have their notes from their meeting, because I know that they did that, and they came back to ESC, and they couldn't think of a way to kind of identify those students other than what we'd already identified. That's good. Thanks, I appreciate the insight. Okay, guys, five minutes, beginning five minutes.